Sadly, all its efforts to keep the site running have been in vain, with the owners deciding it’s time to close down and move on. The message left by the TorrentSpy team on its website is reproduced here in full:

Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users – permanent shutdown.

TorrentSpy always had its user’s privacy in mind when deciding what to do with the service. The company adamantly defended the rights of users to remain anonymous and said on several occasions the site would go down before it revealed private details of individuals. True to its word, that is exactly what has happened.

The company lost the case due in no small part to claims of tampering with evidence. Even so, I think the MPAA is focusing on the wrong problem here. All TorrentSpy did was provide a search service and not the copyright content. The company was an enabler, but not a provider.

This is being seen as a victory by the MPAA, but some other site will replace TorrentSpy, and the same services will be available. So, if it is a victory, then it is a hollow one at best.

Reader Comments

iturk

<span style=”font-size: 7.5pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: ‘Verdana’,’sans-serif'”>Time and time again it has been demonstrated that this "whack a mole" mentality and the subsequent publicity is good for file sharing and bad for the RIAA/MPAA.</span>